Unreal: ‘What difference ... does it make?’

By early September, the template for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign had long been set. All domestic problems were to be depicted as the result of House Republicans’ obstinacy, even the Democrat-controlled Senate’s failure to pass a budget for three years. But on foreign policy, where the president has unilateral authority, Obama was pictured as both highly skilled and tough-minded – an implacable defender of American interests and values, someone who simultaneously presided over U.S. disengagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, vigorously encouraged democracy in North Africa and the Middle East, and forced terrorists into retreat around the world.

Then came the events of Sept. 11-12 in Benghazi, Libya, which severely undermined nearly all of those themes. Four Americans – Ambassador Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, a San Diego native, and security contractors Tyrone Woods of Imperial Beach and Glen Doherty of Encinitas – were killed over a span of about eight hours after heavily armed terrorists attacked a compound that was home to a U.S. consulate and then a U.S. government annex less than a mile away.

So much for the receding threat of terrorism.

So much for competence. It took the U.S. government many long hours to come to the rescue of besieged Americans, even though officials knew they were at great risk of further attacks; two of those slain (Woods and Doherty) were killed more than six hours after the first assault. And it turned out that the State Department had ignored both Stevens’ requests for more security and warnings from the former head of the U.S. security team in Libya about growing anarchy in Benghazi.

And so much for the tidy assumption that helping the “Arab spring” to flower was an obvious policy choice, not a risky one, and that creating chaos in Libya by assisting in the 2011 ouster of dictator Moammar Gadhafi was a good thing.

So what did the Obama administration do in response? Instead of owning up to its failings, for two weeks, it pushed a grossly dishonest narrative that held the attacks were a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video shown on YouTube. And it wasn’t just U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sept. 17 talk shows. It was the president himself in a Sept. 26 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, in the low point of his time in office.

Against this backdrop, it is insulting and offensive for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testily declare “What difference at this point does it make?” when asked at a congressional hearing Wednesday why the White House and the administration refused to acknowledge the truth about Benghazi. She could easily have noted her State Department was far more forthcoming than the White House. On Sept. 12, a State Department undersecretary depicted the Benghazi attacks as a sophisticated terrorist operation in a briefing given to dozens of congressional staffers.

Instead, Clinton’s testimony Wednesday can be seen as a final act of loyalty to the president.

But her loyalty should be to Americans, above all – Americans who should not have been deceived by a president bent on suppressing inconvenient truths.